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MaryTyler Moore

Tallulah
to people

ofa
certain ag, and they'll
grin at the memory of
the scandalous film and
theoter star who joyfully
cursed" ran around scns
underwear and had
bisexual affairs. Bonkhead won admiration

You guys have stayed

buddies?
Oh, yeah. She sent me a
great little note saying,
"I know what theater's
like, Val, but let's catch
up." She came in from

and awards for films

like Alfr ed Hitchcock's
"Lifeboat" (194) ond
Broadway plays such os

Lillian Hellman's "The

Little Foxes" (1939).
When she died in 1968,

where she lives in

Connecticut; she said,
"I'm in New York a few
times a week," so that's
great; I'll get to see her.

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left a legacy of

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You lived in a lot of

different places growing up, but you graduated from a performingarts high school in New

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outrageous sfories,

41

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many of them true.

Valerie Harper, iconic
herself as Rhoda Morgarutern in CBS' "The
Mary Tyler Maore
Show" and "Rhoda" in
the 1970s, dramotizes
one of Bankhead's final
efforts in Matthew
Lombardo's newly
opened Broadway comedyr "Looped." Bosed on
a postproduction audio
session to record (or
"loop") a line of dialogue for Bankhead's
last film appearance in

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York.

near the corner of Perry

and Bleecker streets
with your first husband,
comedian Dick Schaal.
He's still a great friend.
His daughter
my

stepdaughter, beautiful
plays the wife
Wendy
on [the Fox animated

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condominium with

What drew you to Tallulah

Bankhead rather than, sa!,
Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford or any of the other great,

tough women of early Hollywood?

Or Bette Davis, or Katharine
Hepburn
of them.
- any
Tallulah was
great fun. And
the addictions she suffered
to alcohol, specifically bour-bon, to codeine and cocaine
for a very tragic
- all make
thing.
However, the overarching thing in Tallulah's life is a
sense of wit and fun and "I
make no apologies." And she
just kept working
a
- sheofwas
working bad girl. Some
the
girls today are famous for
being obnoxious or outrageous, and they don't do any-'
thing. But Tallulah Banktread

r , . and later you lived

Scotch cigarettes and

withering wit.
Harper, 70, long-married to producer-husband Tony Cocciotti,
spoke at a midtown

tributor Frank Lovece.

The School for Young

Professionals, which is
different from PA [the
High School of the
Performing ArtsJ.

"Die! Die! My Darling!"

(1965), the three-person
play is equol parts

frequent Newsdcy con-

tD

Shovt''is coming up.

Mary came to the matinee on Wednesday.
She's so adorable; she
looks great.

Bankhead

she

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was a really manrelous, successful actress. And, unlike

Billie Holiday or Iudy Garland, that dark cloud of sadness somehow missed her.
Some of the funniest lines in
the play are actual quotes.
Yes! One in the play that's hers
is, "Cocaine, addictive? Nonsense. I ought to know, f've
been doing it for years!" Another, and it's very famous, is, "I'm
as ptrre as the driven slush."

the writer, Matthew Lombardo, got hold of a 4O-minute

piece of Bankhead's actual
looping session, which was
gold for me
could hear
- Ididn't
her in life. She
know
[these outtakes were) being
done, so she was talking about
her makeup man and yelling
about the director [of "Die!

Die! My Darling!"1.... She's

really confrontat ional.

itt" 4oth anniversary of "The

Kathleen Turner did a U.S.

tour of "Tallulah" a few yeans

ago. Was there any thoright to
your doing that instead of this
new play?

That was a one-woman show.

So was "Tallulah Halleluiah!"
[in which Tovah Feldshuh
starred on Broadway in 20001.
This piece is a real play.And

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Missed our chats with

Pierce Brosnan, Maria
Bello and more stars?

/entertainment

seriesl "American Dad."

I don't know if it'll come
through in print, but

even just sitting here

talking you are a bun-

dle of energy. At 70,

how do you keep it up?
lThe great and long-lived
character actressl Ruth Gordon played my mom [in the
1982 TV-movie "Don't Go to
Sleep"J and also played Carl-

ton the Doorman's mother [on

"Rhoda"l, so I worked with
Ruthie twice. Talk about an
individual! What a fantastic,

'singular, personage. And she

gave me the best advice about
age. She said, "There's a decision we all make: You can
choose to get old, or choose to
get older." Old is a destination; older is a process. A
baby gets older, we're all
getting older. So, if you can
stay getting older, you don't
have to go to "Now I'm old."
Some people are old at 40.
And it's just a number anyway; you iust keep living your
life. It's all about aliveness
rather than a number.

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